Saturday, December 19, 2015

The twenty-first century really belongs to my children, but
until I started with the first year of the new century and recording the major
life events, I didn’t realize just how much.
I thought it would be interesting to post it for others in the family to
see, just to get a family perspective.

2000 – Oct. 28 – Pat and Rita married

2001 – May 27, Melissa and John married

2002 - Oct. 6, Amelia
born

Nov. 5,
Connor born

2003

2004 – June 21, Jack born

July 10,
Maya and Ryan married.

2005 – June 20, Andrew born

2006 – July 16, Eli and Mary Beth married

2007

2008 – Feb. , Maya and Ryan divorced

April 14,
Liam born

Nov. 4, Grandma Ventura died

2009 – Sept. 19, Maura and Dan married

2010 – Dec. 29 – Maggie and Owen born

2011 – Grandma Northen died

What amazes me is the continuous flow when looked at as a
family. If any dates are wrong, let me know.

Saturday, November 21, 2015

Can you identify these Northen family babies? They are all either one of my five children or seven
grandchildren. Obviously, some are easier than others. The choices are: Amelia, Andrew, Connor, Eli,
Jack, Liam, Maggie, Maura, Maya, Melissa, Owen and Pat. Only one of each.

Monday, November 16, 2015

One of my projects over the last year or so is to go back
and read from the beginning the journals that I began keeping in about
1970. They were originally all hand
written and then around 1999 I transitioned to keeping them on computer. Today I began reading a new volume of my
journal. It begins on June 14, 1990 and leads
off with one of the more upbeat entries.

It is the
last school day of the year for Maya, who had just graduated from elementary
school and will be headed for middle school.
She received the “Creative Writing Award” for her class and Eli received
“Best All Around Student” for his.
Several days later, there are entries saying that Maura’s high school
graduation has come up and that she has just been involved in an All State band
convention for her school where she had been in charge of orchestrating all of
the student activities. In her class
yearbook, she was voted “most likely to return to school as a teacher” and
“least likely to ditch college for 4 years and go skiing in the Alps”. Meanwhile, Melissa had just been promoted to
head chorister in her choir at St. Paul’s and was also trying out for a part in
a Shakespeare in the Park production in Delaware Park (which she eventually
got). Pat was beginning one of those
boring summer jobs that everyone needs to be able to put under their belt and
say – thank God it’s not my career.

While I
know that for some journal writing seems a form of narcissism, to me it is not
only just a safety net for my own memories (and a way of keeping those memories
I have honest). When I read in just a few pages about what talented (and now
successful) kids I have, it allows me realize just how exceptionally lucky I
am. While I was never the type of parent
to go around forcing pictures of my children on unsuspecting strangers I have always been proud of them and feel compelled to admit
that my good luck continues: Eli’s
architecture firm is going well and he is now “flipping” his first house; Pat
was just named general council for his law firm; Maura was been put in charge
of operations for implementing new computer programs at her job; Melissa has
gotten her yoga instructor’s certifications and is teaching classes; and Maya
is in charge of front desk operations and scheduling for CHF (she has also
finished writing her first novel). Of,
course, I’m not bragging…

In addition
to what I re-discovered about my kids, I also found within the first few pages
a two other things that were a bit more arcane.
The first was a note mentioning that Dad was one of the people who
helped build the original golf course at Disney World – there’s a huge
back-story there, the second was a poem I’d discovered I’d written that I had
completely forgotten. Since it is
November and my productive output this year is zilch, I think I will simply
steal from the past and reprint it here:

In the basement

of an abandoned house

Tinkerbell is trapped

n a Franklin stove.

Her faint light flickers.

The audience has all gone home.

She strains at the sound

of imagined applause,

it is only a bulldozer overhead

sharpening its jaws

to raze the building

where a drive thru bank

will be erected

Aside from the capitalization and lack of punctuation, I’d
actually say it was finished.

I could
perhaps embarrass all five of my children by also reprinting poems that they
wrote when they were young and that I have also kept in the journal. Since none
of them have deemed poetry a worthwhile pursuit for an adult, however, I’ll
leave their past efforts to the past. I think their current successes stand
them in good enough stead.

Friday, November 13, 2015

Even if you don't
think of yourself as a literary buff, you probably know more about famous books
in literature than you think that you do. Just for fun, here is a little quiz
for you to check yourself on.There are
two parts and in each, I give you the first line of a famous novel. Part one is the easiest. Name the
book and who wrote it.The second part
is a bit tougher so it is multiple choice for the title, but you still try to name the author.One point each for title and author with a
total of 20 points.

1. “In a hole in the
ground there lived a hobbit.” __________

2. “Alice was
beginning to get very tired sitting on the bank and having nothing to do.”
____________

3. “You don’t know me
without you have read a book of The
Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain’t no

matter.
___________

4. “Call me Ishmael.”
______________

5. “Mrs. Dalloway
said she would buy the flowers herself.” ____________-

Wednesday, November 04, 2015

While almost anyone in the family would agree that my mother
did not have an easy life, that claim could be made of almost any of her
siblings - and perhaps in particular her sister Beryl. Beryl was born in 1924, three years younger
than Mom and in many ways they were similar. They were about the same height,
both with blond hair and round faces that seeming to take after the Sitzmann
side of the family. Both loved to talk and smiled a lot and, out of a family
with ten children, they were the two who ended up with the most children
themselves - Beryl with six and Mom with seven. She and Mom were running about
even and Beryl might have had more,
except for the turn that her life took in 1958.

Beryl was married to a man named Mickey Near. My memories of him are vague. The earliest
that I remember seeing him was in was when we lived in San Diego and I was ten or eleven years
old. Her had dark wavy hair and had a
reputation for drinking. I remember little about him except that I did not like
him. He seemed a bit of a braggadocio and so different from my father, not the
kind of person I felt comfortable around.
The one concrete thing I remember was that we were playing cribbage and
he commented that the only time he had ever lost a game was to a blind
man. That level of humor probably
captures the general aura that surrounded him.

When I was twelve and beginning seventh grade, my family
moved up to Santa Ana.
We lived on South Baker St.,
only a few blocks away from Aunt Beryl and her family who lived on Camden Ave. We would go around to visit them and all of
the cousins were expected to play together. At that time Mom had five (Ed was
the youngest) and Beryl had four. The
oldest two in each set were parallel ages.
Beryl’s oldest, Teresa, was six months younger than me. She had her dad’s wavy black hair, light skin
and freckles. No one ever actually called her by her given name. Instead she was called Tinker or just
Tink. Her next youngest sister Patty,
was tall, thin and had dark blond hair. The two had very different
personalities. Tink was precocious and
brash, whereas Patty was quieter. Patty died of lupus in her mid-twenties,
without children and having been married only a few years. The rumor was that
when she began to get really sick, her husband deserted her. Tink’s life took quite a different course. When our families got together the house was
crowded.

It was not long after we were settled into our place in
Santa Ana and I was attending junior high, that Beryl called Mom to say that Mickey
had died. She found him lying on the bathroom floor. The circumstances of his
death were never exactly clear but it appeared to be connected with his
drinking. Making the situation even more difficult was that Beryl was pregnant when Mickey died.
Beryl pledged that whether her child were a boy or a girl (there were no
ultrasounds in those days), she would name it after her husband. So her
youngest daughter was named Mickie. This
was in 1958. At age 34, Beryl was
widowed with five children.

How Beryl met Frank Liska, I have no idea, but within a
couple of years, they were married. Beryl was 36 and Frank just 32. Frank was
originally from New York, the first easterner in the family. He wasn’t the
handsomest guy in the world – he had a head of hair like Larry Fine and was
already starting to bald in the middle – but of all my male relatives, Frank
may have been the nicest and most genuine. I heard others say more than once
that it took a pretty remarkable person to make the commitment to raise five
kids that were not his own.

No doubt Uncle Frank’s commitment (and Aunt Beryl’s too) was
tested pretty soon because in 1962 at age 15 Tink was pregnant and, like any
Catholic girl of that time, got married. It wasn’t exactly a shotgun wedding,
but it was probably pretty close. Her husband’s name was Marion Blair, but he
went by Junior. So by the time that she was 37, Beryl was also a
grandmother.

Shortly, thereafter Frank started a business putting up
block walls called Star Construction. Frank
hired my Dad and Junior to work with him. It was long, tough work. Dad would come home with his hand torn and
calloused from working with the blocks all day.
Even so, Dad and Frank were proud of their work because they could drive
almost anywhere near the city of Orange and see their walls lining all of the
homes in the mushrooming the suburbs.
When I was 16, not long after the company started, I worked for it too as a mason tender during
the summer between my junior and senior year of high school. Both Dad and Frank
had a tremendous work ethic, but Junior, Dad used to say, though a nice enough
guy wasn’t much of a worker.

Once I graduated from high school I pretty much lost contact
with Aunt Beryl’s family. They
eventually all ended up moving north to Paradise in Butte County, California.
No one in Mom’s family had it easy. “Happy Days” notwithstanding, life wasn’t
easy for everyone in the fifties. When
vying for which of my mother’s siblings had the most to contend with, though,
I’d say Aunt Beryl was in the running for top place.

Friday, July 31, 2015

Sometimes
old news is new. The other day I was
looking on line renewing a book from Pennsauken Library, when I saw that the
library site has a link that allows me to search Heritage Quest for several kinds
of family records including censuses, slave schedules and cite directories by
using my library ID number. Because U.
S. censuses only go up to 1940, I decided to take advantage of anything that I
could find on city directories that
might tell me a bit more about my parents, who were not married until
1942.

I
found an address for James and Elvera Northen in Long Beach, California in 1952
(2313 W. Willard), listing him as being in the US Navy. This makes sense because my sister Judi was
born in Long Beach in 1951, and I have it in my head that when I was four years
old we lived in El Sobrante and that I moved to Long Beach when I began
kindergarten. I did, in fact, find a
listing in Long Beach for my dad in 1953 as well. It is on a page that is putatively a city
directory but lists a series of numbers rather than addresses. Our was 70-0677,
whatever that signifies.

According to a 1954 city directory, however,
Dad is listed as living at 2024 Ward St. in Oakland.
This was a surprise to me because in my own memory, the next place we
lived of any duration was in Berkeley where I finished out second grade and
began third. I thought perhaps that – because Berkeley
and Oakland were relatively close to each other
that, we had actually lived in Oakland rather
than Berkeley. When I found the address on Google Maps and
looked at just where the address was, I was in for a bit of a surprise. That section of Oakland
is right next to Alameda and I know that I lived
in Alameda at
some point during my early life. My only very vague memory was that it was near
a train track. I’d thought that Alameda was prior to living in Long Beach, but now I realize it must have
been after. It is actually is a perfect
fit. There is a gap in my memory between
when I first started school in Long Beach and when I moved to the apartments in
Berkeley and finished out the end of second grade in Washington School. I also
vaguely remember having to leave a school before the end of the year around the
time of my birthday to move in either first or second grade. That time period must have been my time in
Alameda.

It
is definitely true that even one’s past can continually change. So I
reconstruct the sequence of this time period as El Sobrante when I was 4 (in
1950), Long Beach -where Judi was born - from 1951-1953, Alameda 1953-4, and
then on to Berkeley 1954-5. In Berkeley,
I finished second grade in Washington Elementary school and then we discovered
that I as in the wrong school district so started at LeConte Elementary in the
fall of 1955. Shortly after school began we moved to Concord where Ed was born
in October 1955. So that is where Alameda fits in.

But
wait – as they say in TV commercials – there is a small fly in the ointment. My
brother Dave, according to his birth certificate, was born in Alameda in August
of 1950. So how does this fit in? Did we
live in Alameda prior to moving to Long Beach in addition to living there after
as well? It is a possibility, but
looking at a map I discovered something else as well. More than likely in 1950,
Dad was working at the Naval base in San Francisco. San Francisco is about mid-distance between
El Sobrante (where I thought we lived) and Alameda (where Dave was born). Perhaps the hospital where Dave was born was
a naval hospital, so he was born in Alameda even though we actually lived in El
Sobrante. For now, I think that is the
hypothesis I will choose.

Sunday, May 24, 2015

(A few days ago I was wondering at
what point I stopped thinking of myself as a Californian and began identifying with
other places I lived. I asked Maura if
she now felt like a resident of Seattle or if she still thought of herself as a
Buffalonian. This was her reply. I think
she made so many good points that I could not resist – with her permission –
posting it as a blog in its own right.)

I
have been in Seattle for nearly 14 years ( I arrived in June). I definitely
feel like it is home. It is funny you asked because I was recently
thinking about how I perceived the city when I first moved here. I
remember getting lost in locations that I now know like the back of my
hand. Also, I think it feels more like my permanent home because of Dan.
When I married him I knew I was also marrying Seattle in a way because I would
have a very hard time getting him to move anywhere else. I guess that is
kind of like when Pat married Rita or Eli married MB. We have recently
seen a huge influx into Seattle, mostly related to Amazon hiring. A
constant dialog here is about the sky rocketing rents, the awful traffic and
the insane amounts of construction. It is funny because I find myself
sympathizing with the complaints about how the city is not the same because of
the rapid growth and how if it continues Seattle will lose its character.
Then I remember that I am one of the émigrés.

Still,
I will always think of myself as from Buffalo. There is definitely a part
of my personality which was formed by my Buffalo upbringing and I don’t think
that will ever leave me. I love Seattle, I enjoy the people and like that
it is a very socially conscious and environmentally conscious area.
People tend to be educated, there are a lot of cultural opportunities as well
as a diversity of cultures/backgrounds that does not exist in Buffalo.
There are many professional opportunities. But Buffalo has a gritty
aspect that I think I benefited from. People are just more real and
honest there. The poverty is more in your face and nobody tries to white
wash it. There is a history there of families who have lived there for
many generations, ever since their relatives arrived at Ellis Island.
People my age talk about the old days of Seattle with Boeing and grunge and
cheap and easy access to things like skiing and camping. That is not a
Seattle I ever knew. When I hear my Buffalo friends talking (via FB
mostly) about Bethlehem Steal, and the Elmwood Strip, and sledding at Chestnut
Ridge that is my personal history and identification.

So,
I’m not sure if I will ever be able to say I am from just one place. Both
have impacted who I am and what I do. When I am in Seattle it will often
come up that I am from Buffalo. Many here are not “natives” so it is
a common conversation starter. But, when I go elsewhere I always identify
myself as being from Seattle. All in all, I will take it. I always
feel a bit sorry for people like Dan or Rita or my Long Island and Buffalo
friends who have lived in one area for their whole life. It seems so
limiting. I know my personality changes in each place I live. I am drawn
out by different aspects of each culture. If you never have a change of
environment then you never really have the opportunity to explore some
different facets of your personality.

Well,
that was more of a dissertation than you were probably asking for, but
I find it is an interesting topic. It would be
interesting to put together a collection of essays by different people with different
backgrounds and experiences on what “home” means to them. It is so
important, but so different, for each of us.

Saturday, April 18, 2015

Ed emailed me today to tell me that one of my few remaining aunts,
Sr. Karen, died on Friday. I suppose that every family has that relative that
they would rather not have show up at their front door. In our family, it was
Sr. Karen – but she showed up anyway.
She is also one of my top candidates for the person least likely to be a
nun – but, again, she was. If the
capacity to put on blinders to the feelings of others and plow ahead with what
you want can be considered a virtue, then that virtue was Sr. Karen’s.

I think we all have our stories about Sr. Karen that
illustrate what has caused us to form our particular opinions. I’ll just offer two brief ones and hope
others will add their own. The first was
when my son Pat, was an infant. We were
in my parents’ living room and my wife Mary was nursing Pat. Sr. Karen walked into the room, grabbed Pat
and started pulling him away from her in mid-nurse. The second instance happened when Lora and I
were visiting in California, I think for Mom and Dad’s Golden Anniversary. It was getting late in the evening, the sky
was dark and everyone was tired. We were
sitting in the living room and Sr. Karen was there as well. People kept hinting that they were tired and
wanted to go to bed, but Sr, Karen did not take the hint. One by one, people got up and headed back to
bed. Finally, only Lora and I were left and finally, we said we were going to
bed. We walked down the hall and turned out the lights. But Sr. Karen still
didn’t leave. She just sat there until she felt like going. The ultimate indictment for me is that on one
occasion Dad, who had the patience of Job and was rarely roused to anger,
actually kicked her out of the house.

I’m sure that other family members have happier memories of
her. I have the sense that she and my
sister Mary were close at one time and that she helped Mary out. She would also send out a family newsletter
every Christmas before blogs and email
came into vogue and update everyone on her year and her various travels. Though it was mostly about her, it was a way
of trying to keep the family connected. I
suspect that Sr. Karen saw herself as a caring person and that by gracing
people with her visits she was doing them a favor.

Ed says that, despite her flaws, she had potential, and
perhaps he is right. She went into the
convent at fourteen years old and while still young was sent to the Solomon
Islands (near New Guinea) to work in the missions there for a period of ten
years. I suspect some kind of cultures
shock occurred – this wasn’t a time in history when farm girls went off to
exotic islands. Even Mom, who gave Sr,
Karen no ground for anything said that when she returned, she was never the same
person.

Mom and Sr. Karen were
like oil and water. Their relationship
would have made for a TV situation comedy.
Whenever I called Mom during the last few years of her life, I could
always expect to hear about the tribulations she had suffered at the hands of
Sr. Karen. At that point in their
relationship, Sr. Karen could have been St. Karen and she still would not have
had a chance. Even so, she was Mom’s sister and the original left. In fact, if she is still alive, my Aunt
Geneice in Texas may be the only one.

As I was updating my information about Sr. Karen on the
family tree, I also discovered that my Aunt Beryl had died in January of this
year. Beryl was Mom’s next youngest sister and the polar
opposite of Sr. Karen. She was the one
Mom was closest too and had a tremendous amount
of character. Her life, though,
is a whole different saga.

Wednesday, April 15, 2015

Recently,
Judi posted a pictures of the six Northen siblings at the reception after Mom’s
funeral. Whenever I look at Dave in that picture, it reminds me of one of the
very few of my Grandpa Wilkins that I have of him at a younger age. In that picture he is standing with his
oldest daughter, my Aunt Lucille, who is a young adult and his mother. This means the picture must have been
from about 1940.
I cropped the two pictures and pasted them together and put them out on
Facebook with the following comment: “Judi and Ed, I've always
thought this picture of Dave in the photo Judi posted the other day looked a
lot like a younger picture of Grandpa Wilkins, but see what you think.”

Ed's and
Judi’s comments were as follows:

Ed Northen I have never
looked at the two photos together but yes they do resemble one another.

Judi Frensley I think they do too! I think he has the same
body frame too. It's hard for me to remember Grandpa Wilkins not in a wheel
chair.

Though
I was glad that I saw these comments that support my perception, what really
interested me was the conversation that came next.

Cloice
Janson Dave looks just like your Dad....good old Jim he was always
so good to me... Even when I recked his car, in to a gas Pump at Dave's Mobile
station....anyone remember THAT????

Judi
Frensley Well of course we remember that. I was in the car with you.
This story has been told many times in this family.

Cloice Janson Yeah, that was embarrassing, the day after I got my license
.... We didn't even get in trouble... WELL guess I did by David but your mom
and Dad were so good about it.
Yep I thought my driving career was very short and over. Thank God your dad
saved me… Many many memories with you guys.

For
the younger generation of Northen’s who may not know, Cloice was Dave’s first wife and one of Judi’s
best friends as a teenager. This
exchange struck me on a number of levels.
First of all, I was out of the family loop by that time and had never
heard the story. Second, I thought it was hysterical. I was laughing out loud at Judi’s comment
about being in the car.

More
than anything, however, what it does is reinforce my own warm images of Dad and
Mom. I know that people outside of the family who hear about our upbringing
simply don’t get why we all have such loyalty to Dad, but this is exactly why. Dad and Mom would do anything to try to help
out their children’s friends and Cloice was by no means the only one. A number of them ended up living at our house
– even becoming part of the family. Mom
also said that what was most important to her was that her kids group up to be
good people, and when it came to how they treated others, they led by example.

What
I love about Cloice’s comment is that her image of Dad is fresh from a time
warp. She and Dave separated early in
their lives, so her image of Dad is that of the person he was many years ago
and it is the core image of Dad that I still carry with me. What Cloice said here, only as a kind of
passing joke, to me is a real tribute to them.
If people think as well of us when we’re gone, then I think we will be
satisfied – at least I know I will.

Friday, April 10, 2015

( The following is blatantly plagiarized from Maya’s Lilies and Elephants blog.My mother made zucchini bread as well – Ed and
Judi can probably either back me up or prove me wrong – but the following words
are all Maya’s. If you have zucchini bread memories, please share them in the
comment. MN)

When
I was a kid, my mom invented a game for us called Mixer. Or rather she probably
gave an "official" name to an activity that countless other mothers
had also shared with their children. Mixer was this: we took every allowable
baking ingredient (flour, sugar, brown sugar, baking soda, baking powder,
spices, water, milk) and mixed them into a bowl however we wanted, and then
baked and ate it. They didn't guide our cooking, just let us go to town.
Keeping in mind that my brother and I were probably four and five years old at
the time, the fact that my parents ate these concoctions
and deemed them "delicious" is a testament to their
love.

In
the past 30 years, my cooking style hasn't changed much, other than the fact
that I now know the ratio of baking soda to flour shouldn't be 10 to 1, or
you're going to get some strange looking (and tasting) baked goods.

I
like to cook, I really do. But I'm a vegetarian, and many of my dinners involve
things like veggie stir fry with baked tofu or seitan, and that's pretty self
explanatory. The majority of my cooking is in one of two forms:
intricately follow a recipe from a book/site/pinterest that I could never
duplicate without it, or throw everything in the pan/pot/baking dish and taste
as I go along, adjusting and learning from trial and error. There's not much of
a middle ground.

My
day to day "recipes" also don't hold much special meaning to me,
unless you could general sustenance as special, which I guess it kind of is.
Still, they didn't seem like something worthy of a blog post. But to keep
to the theme, I did, technically, choose a food that does have a special
meaning to me. Then, I googled it and found a version here on All Recipies. (Note: this is not my recipe nor do
I know the person that wrote it, but it got 5 stars so why not?). The recipe is
for Zucchini Bread. I admit, I've never used this particular recipe, but it
seems about right. To duplicate the bread of my memories, I'd suggest adding
raisins, if you're a raisin person. If not I'm sure it'll be just fine without
it.

Zucchini
bread and I go way back. Probably farther back than Mixer and I do. My Grandma Venturalived in
Buffalo, NY which was, at the closest, about six and a half hours from where I
grew up (significantly more when we lived in Georgia, of course). As a child,
zucchini bread was synonymous with my grandma, and vice versa. Every time she
came to visit us, she'd get off the plane holding loaves of zucchini
bread wrapped in foil - I can still picture this exact scene.... it was in the
days when you could still meet people at the gates. Going to Buffalo to visit
her, we'd leave after my parents got home from work, usually around 6 or 7 PM I
suppose, and arrive in the middle of the night. She'd always be wide awake (I
was amazed at this, since it was usually 2 or 3 AM by the time we got there)
and have zucchini bread and Italian Wedding Soup waiting for us. Sadly the soup
was out for me after I became veg at the age of 11. This tradition happened
every visit, which was at least Thanksgiving, Christmas/New Year, and Easter
every year, from the time I first remember until I was about 17. In college, I
wasn't at Grandma's as much, but when we visited each other, it was the
same.

I
think I knew when Grandma started to get sick because the zucchini bread and
soup stopped. I couldn't imagine she'd break the tradition for any other reason
other than that she physically couldn't keep it up. She either wasn't able to
remember how to make them, or didn't have the energy. I'm not sure which, as
she covered her symptoms up well at first. Probably, it was a combination.
Eventually, she couldn't remember what the stove was for.

My Grandmother passed away, seven years later, from stroke induced dementia and
Parkinson's. Towards the end, she didn't recognize us and could barely
communicate. But we talked to her anyways, telling her stories from the past,
hoping to get a glimpse of some recollection, to share happy memories with her.
Once, when she seemed to stop recognizing us and communicating all together, we
reminded her of our late night arrivals to her house, and how she used to greet
us with zucchini bread and wedding soup. She quietly said, "but no soup
for Maya, not with the meat." Whether it was a moment of lucidity, or she was
more alert than we thought and just couldn't tell us, we'll never know. But in
that moment, I realized not only how much those visits, and that zucchini bread
(and for everyone else, the soup), meant to us, but how much they must have
meant to her.

Monday, March 23, 2015

Last week I was at a lecture at the Philadelphia Historical
Society about using various family documents
to try to put together a family tree.
One of the speakers was talking about how family pictures can be
misleading. She put one up on the screen
and was pointing out that the places in which people were standing made you
draw conclusions that were not necessarily correct. In fact, a couple of the
people in the picture were not even family members.

On my old computer downstairs, my desktop screen shows the following
picture.

.

As I was look at it today, I remembered the lecture and
thought that if someone in the future saw came across this picture, they might
draw a few wrong conclusions so I decided to play a bit of a game with myself to
see what I might think, if I knew nothing about this family. Here goes.

The picture is of a
birthday party. The boy in the great sweatshirt
who is blowing out the candles is probably turning about ten years old, though
it is hard to tell because of the flames.
Looking on are his two brothers.
They all have similar haircuts.
The youngest who looks to be about three has the same hair and skin
color as the birthday both and the same eye color has his oldest brother who is
about thirteen. Watching them is their
grandmother or possibly an older aunt – she looks young to have a thirteen year
old grandson, but a bit old to be the mother of the youngest boy. Both boys are wearing sweatshirts that, if
you put the names together spell Eagles, so they probably live in Philadelphia.
If it is football season, then this picture is probably taking place in
fall. This is backed up by the fact that
the grandmother is wearing a sweater in the house as is someone whose elbow we
can only see.

These are the most
obvious guesses, but one might guess
that the elbow belongs to the boys’ mother.
The picture on the wall behind them looks like a large family group, so
it is likely that their mother would be there for the party. (As opposed to the
boys living with their grandmother.)
The house is probably a good size house – or at least not a small one
because the stairs in the background show that there is a second floor. The table we are looking at is just a
portion of what appears to be a much larger table so this must be the dining room. The
display of plates behind them also has more the look of a dining room than a
kitchen. It is a dining room that is
actually used for eating, though, because there are salt and pepper shakers on
the table and those don’t go too well with cake. The birthday boy likes diet
coke, while the grandmother prefers crush which she drinks from a can rather
than using a glass like her grandson.

Since this is a family blog, anyone who is reading this,
will recognize that a couple of the conclusions drawn here are wrong, but I think
it is an interesting exercise in making
assumptions. No doubt some of you would
have come up with different inferences.

Friday, March 20, 2015

Recently
Lora, Maya and I took a trip to Lisbon. It was a three day stop on route to a
conference in Marrakech. We’d first
landed in Casablanca and then taken a plane to Portugal. As we walked out onto the tarmac in the Lisbon airport to board the plane for our return trip to Casablanca, we were
surprised to see that we were walking towards not a jet, but a propeller
plane. Knowing that we were going to be
flying over a stretch of the Mediterranean Sea and possibly even the Atlantic
to reach Casablanca,
this was a cause for dismay among some of the passengers.

Yesterday
as I was working on family history, I came across a document I had never seen
before, and it surprised me as much as walking up to that propeller plane in Lisbon. It was called “Clearance Declaration of
Aircraft Commander.” The document was issued on April 20, 1948 in Honolulu, Hawaii. It was a list of non-Navy passengers who were
being transported back to the United
States; aboard it were my mother, me and my
brother Steve. I was two and my brother Steve, who had born on March 21 of that
year, was less than a month old. As a
family, our places of birth made a strange grouping on the list since Mom’s was as Aberdeen, South
Dakota, mine was San Diego, and Steve’s was Honolulu, TH – the TH meaning
Territory of Hawaii since Hawaii was not yet a state. As the document notes, we were “Bound for” Alameda, California.
The ultimate destination for the three of us was listed as 838
N. Van Ness St., Santa Ana, California – my grandparents’ house.

As
I look at that piece of paper that appeared like something out of a time warp, I
wonder how my mother felt on this trip, sixty-four years ago. It must have been extremely difficult for
her. She was traveling with two young
children, having given birth less than a month before, over a distance of 2400
miles, and I can imagine, being a military plane, it was no luxury travel. It was certainly a propeller plane – one that
probably makes my recent plane from Lisbon
look like luxury transport. . Once she
landed, she had to make her way down to southern California.
The distance between the two cities, Alameda
and Santa Ana,
is about 370 miles. My guess is that she
took a bus. It would have added another
day to the journey. Even for someone who
was used to a tough life, this could not have been an easy trip, and I
seriously doubt they had massive plates of lamb and Moroccan tangines waiting
for them at the other end as I recently did.

Tomorrow
is Steve’s birthday, the first full day of spring. He would have been 65 years old – retirement
age. I always knew that he had been born
in Hawaii, but I never imagined that he had been uprooted at only a month old
and transported down to begin life in his grandparents’ house. Of course, one can always see signs and
causes in events, if they look long enough, but I wonder if such a beginning
had any bearing on the short, often troubled, life that he led. What might his life have been like given the
stability and advantages that my grandchildren have.

Monday, March 16, 2015

Meeting up with my brother Pat and his wife Rose in New York
last month in New York was a really wonderful occasion for me. Pat and I are
fifteen years apart – something that seems a bit strange in today’ smaller
families – but because of that, by the time he was in kindergarten, I was
already in college. With a continent
between us, it has only been on rare occasions that we had a chance to get
together and , often, as for the illness or deaths of our parents, it was not
the happiest of circumstances. Perhaps
because I am a bit closer to encountering that scythe-wielding figure myself that in the last few years it has become
important for me to try to fill in some of the gaps in the saga of our
family. I frequently wish that I were
able to sit down with Dad or with Mom as she was before she had trouble
communicating, and ask them questions about their lives.. There is still much about them that I don’t
know or understand.

It has been eighteen years since Dad’s death. Had he lived,
he would have been 94 years old this month.
In the spirit of trying to keep some memory of him alive and, perhaps
just importantly, passing along a little about him to children and
grandchildren who met him long ago, if at all, I’m posting one of my ersatz
quizzes . It is one of those where those
who get the most answers wrong my likely benefit the most from having done it. (For ease, I’ll just use the word “Dad” in
the questions.)

1.Dad’s middle name was ______________.

(a)Edward,
(b) Lee, (c) Crocker, (d) Lewis

2. When he was growing up, Dad’s religion was ____________.

(a)
Catholic, (b) Baptist, (c) Episcopal, (d) Seventh Day Adventist

3. Dad played sports on a high school team. What was his
sport. (a) wrestling,

(b)
football, (c) baseball, (d) swim team

4. When Dad was
eleven years old, both of his parents died.
How did his mother die.

Tuesday, January 06, 2015

As usual , at the end of 2014, I went back and read through
the journal I keep and was amazed at the many things that had happened during
the year that I’d forgotten. It was a tremendously full year. While I have the impulse to wax lyrical about it,
what seems to be more enjoyable and generate more interest are the family quizzes
reviewing the years. In fact, I think it’s
getting to become a bit of a tradition. So here is the quiz for 2014. Since I
stuck with questions about those who are most likely to see it, this is probably
the easiest family quiz yet.